Film review: My Scientology Movie (2015)

I am both fascinated and disturbed by cults. Fascinated because of my interest in the psychology of the kind of people who are drawn to cults and then get indoctrinated, and disturbed because of the often tragic consequences that ensue to them and their loved ones. One of the most pernicious cults is the highly secretive Church of Scientology, notorious for the reports of how they exploit and abuse cult members and viciously attack anyone who manages to escape from their clutches, not to mention anyone that seeks to shine a light on them. As a result, even some of the people who have escaped are too frightened to talk publicly about what they went through.

This article in Vice gives the account of someone who managed to escape the church and describes the methods they use to suck people into it and what life was like once you had been recruited. The person is disguised and has their voice altered because of fear of being recognized by the church and hounded.

More comprehensive treatments can be found in the 2013 book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright and the 2015 Alex Gibney documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief based on that book. I wrote about this cult before and reviewed both the book and the film.

In an interview at the Sundance Film Festival where the film was screened, Gibney and Wright discuss how they were fascinated by the question of how it could be that people who were smart and idealistic and caring, by no means simpletons, could get sucked into an organization that was so exploitative and abusive. These people, once they left, were themselves shocked at how they did not see what was so obvious to them now.

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Dennett’s somewhat dangerous idea

The philosopher Daniel Dennett has recently published a memoir and in a review Matthew Lau accuses him of pursuing a ‘dead end social Darwinism’. He says that Dennett has defended the idea of ‘adaptationism’, the view “that all features of an organism must be adapted for some good purpose.” This has been rejected by other scholars of evolution like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin who argue that some features did not come into being to serve a specific purpose but were instead accidental byproducts of the evolutionary process. Those two authors gave the image of the spandrels in cathedrals.

In architecture, spandrels are a structural byproduct resulting from the placement a dome on top of four rounded arches. The spandrels fill in the empty space where the arch stops touching the top of the dome, stabilizing the overall structure. In finished cathedrals they are frequently painted and otherwise beautifully ornamented, as in the four famed spandrels of the Cathedral of San Marcos in Venice, Italy, that depict the four biblical rivers (Tigris, Euphrates, Indue, and Nile).

For Gould and Lewontin, if we adopt the adaptationist perspective, we might mistakenly assume the San Marcos spandrels were initially formed to be part of the cathedral’s artwork and miss their origin as necessary structural byproducts.

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Trump chickens out on abortion

One measure of how Republicans are viewing with alarm that their extreme positions on abortion risks damage at the polls is that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), usually never shy about pandering to the religious and political extremists in his base, kept quiet about what his stance was on this issue for the longest time.

But he could not duck the issue forever and today his campaign issued a statement on his social media site Truth Social that was mealy-mouthed.

Donald Trump on Monday announced his belief that individual US states should decide the legality of abortion – and he declined to endorse a national ban on the procedure.

The former president’s stated position dashed hopes from anti-abortion groups that he would call for a ban on aborting pregnancies beyond 15 weeks.

“States will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both,” Trump said in a video post on Truth Social. “Whatever they decide must be the law of the land, or in this case the law of the state.

“Many states will be different, many will have a different number of weeks, some will be more conservative then others. At the end of the day this is all about the will of the people. You must follow your heart, or in many cases your religion or faith,” he said in a four-minute address outlining his view of reproductive rights in the wake of the US supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022.

He added, “Do what’s right for your family, and do what’s right for yourself.”

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More on the right wing freakout over Easter and the Transgender Day of Visibility

The Daily Show show had fun at the expense of Faux News and other rightwing news sources losing their minds over the fact that this year, because of a calendar coincidence, Transgender Day of Visibility coincided with Easter. And let’s be clear, these people know better. They are just pretending to be outraged, like a lot of their other ‘outrages’.

Desi Lydic made the important point that what these people object to is not that the visibility day coincides with Easter, they dislike the fact that the transgender community exists at all.

Also, make sure you get to the very funny conversation she has with Michael Kosta that begins at the 6:35 mark.

Bigots will seize upon anything to advance bigotry

March 31st is the day that has been designated Transgender Day of Visibility and president Biden made an annual proclamation to that effect. The date is an international recognition that has been around since 2009. The White House routinely issues proclamations such as this to recognize various things, and this one was one of 11 that were issued on March 29th.

But this year, March 31st is also Easter Sunday and so bigots have shrilly proclaimed that the date of the visibility day was deliberately chosen by the White House so as to be an insult to Christianity.
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Woman charged with murder over abortion sues prosecutors

In Texas a woman who was charged with murder for self-managing an abortion, and spent two nights in jail before the charge was dropped, is now suing the prosecutors for $1 million.

The lawsuit filed by Lizelle Gonzalez in federal court Thursday comes a month after the state bar of Texas fined and disciplined the district attorney in rural Starr county over the case in 2022, when Gonzalez was charged with murder in “the death of an individual by self-induced abortion”.

Under the abortion restrictions in Texas and other states, women who seek abortions are exempt from criminal charges.

The lawsuit argues Gonzalez suffered harm from the arrest and subsequent media coverage. She is seeking $1m in damages.
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According to the lawsuit, Gonzalez was 19 weeks pregnant when she used misoprostol, one of two drugs used in medication abortions. Misoprostol is also used to treat stomach ulcers.

After taking the pills, Gonzalez received an obstetrical examination at a hospital emergency room and was discharged with abdominal pain. She returned with bleeding the next day and an exam found no fetal heartbeat. Doctors performed a caesarian section to deliver a stillborn baby.

The lawsuit argues that the hospital violated the patient’s privacy rights when they reported the abortion to the district attorney’s office, which then carried out its own investigation and produced a murder charge against Gonzalez.

Cecilia Garza, an attorney for Gonzalez, said prosecutors pursued an indictment despite knowing that a woman receiving an abortion is exempted from a murder charge by state law.

Prosecutors would had to have known that even in Texas, women could not be charged for receiving an abortion but they decided on charging her with murder anyway, in what seems like a purely vindictive effort to frighten other women who may seek to terminate their pregnancies using legal medications.

The GOP gets crazier and crazier

In an earlier post, I wrote about how the GOP is on a slippery slope when it comes to some issues, where in pandering to their base by accepting certain premises like that life begins at conception, they found themselves quickly dragged to the logical end point that embryos produced in the IVF process are children and thus cannot be destroyed. Now they fond themselves struggling to extricate themselves from the mess they put themselves into without disavowing the ‘life begins at conception’ premise because doing so would infuriate their base.

But that is not the only slippery slope that the GOP find itself on. It is as if the floodgates of oil have opened on the slopes and there is no way to halt the descent.
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The GOP ties itself up in knots over Alabama IVF ruling

After the Alabama supreme court ruled that embryos are children and deserve all the protections that children are entitled to, IVF clinics in the state began to stop providing IVF services because of fears that if any embryo were to be destroyed (which is done routinely with embryos that are no longer needed), they could be culpable.

The ruling has caused an uproar because IVF treatments have broad support. So the state legislature rushed to pass a law to protect IVF doctors and parents from any legal repercussions. But apparently the law is pretty tortured in its reasoning.

The enacted legislation doesn’t define or clarify whether under state law frozen embryos created via IVF have the same rights as children. Rather, the narrowly tailored bill is designed to protect doctors, clinics and other health care personnel who provide IVF treatment and services by offering such workers civil and criminal “immunity.”

The new law will “provide civil and criminal immunity for death or damage to an embryo to any individual or entity when providing or receiving services related to in vitro fertilization.”

It says that “no action, suit, or criminal prosecution for the damage to or death of an embryo shall be brought or maintained against any individual or entity when providing or receiving services related to in vitro fertilization.”

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The GOP is on a very slippery slope

The GOP is discovering that there is a real danger in pandering to the extreme right wing religious faction within their party because those people are insatiable in seeking to carry out their fanatical beliefs to their logical conclusions. The strategy works as long as their followers do not take things too far.

Take the case of abortion. For many on the right, the overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision, that said that women had a right to terminate their pregnancies before a certain period, became a rallying cry and when the US Supreme Court did just that, they were ecstatic. But among those calling for the overthrow were those who believed that life begins at conception and that anything that prevents a fertilized egg from further growth is tantamount to murder. These people were energized and proceeded to pass state laws that prevented abortion under any circumstances, even in the case of danger to the life and health of the mother and even if the fetus had such problems that it did not have a viable chance of survival, or would suffer from all manner of serious abnormalities.

But while these people are a significant force in the GOP , they are minority nationwide. There is a whole spectrum of people on this issue. It was always the case that there was a majority of people who felt that abortion should be allowed under certain circumstances, although they were not unanimous on where the line should be drawn. But it is clear that that line is not that far from what Roe drew. But rather than negotiating about the line, the extremists took their position that life begins at conception to its logical conclusion and demanded the outright. banning of abortion This has caused a serious backlash as popular movements to restore abortion rights kept winning referenda quite easily even in so-called red states, and anti-choice extremist candidates fared poorly at the polls.
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